Budgeting and the propensity to create budgetary slack

This paper reports the results of a field study designed to investigate how managers' propensities to create budgetary slack are affected by the budgeting system and the technical context. The results show that propensities to create slack are lower where managers participate actively in budgeting, particularly when technologies are relatively predictable. But such propensities are higher if a tight budget requires frequent tactical responses to avoid overruns.     

An Examination of Changes in Specialists' Posted Price Schedules

New York Stock Exchange specialists disseminate informationto market participants by displaying price schedules consistingof bid prices, ask prices, bid depths, and ask depths. We examinehow specialists update these price schedules in a simultaneousequations model. We find that changes in the best prices anddepths on the limit order book have a significant impact onthe posted price schedule, while the effects of transactionsand order activity are secondary. Furthermore, we show thatspecialists revise prices and depths differently, but find noevidence that they revise the price schedule in response tochanges in inventory.     

Problems of Bank Lending in Bulgaria: Information Asymmetry and Institutional Learning

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Coping with poverty in international assistance policy: An evaluation of spatially integrated investment strategies

International assistance agencies have turned increasingly to integrated rural development policies in an attempt to ameliorate the inequitable distribution of economic growth plaguing Third World nations since World War II. This paper reviews the functionally and spatially integrated investment strategies of the World Bank, USAID and the United Nations, outlines their objectives, perceptions of the problem, basic assumptions and programmes, and evaluates them in terms of potential difficulties for implementation. Those factors crucial to making integrated development policies operational — knowledge of human ecosystems in rural areas, analytical ability, operational procedures, arrangements for local participation, subsistence systems indicators and administrative capacity of local and national governments — are discussed and assessed.     

Accounting aggregation: User preferences and decision making

This experiment tests the effects of alternative aggregations of accounting data in a simulated portfolio task. Certain entropy-based aggregation criteria were used to prepare differentially aggregated financial statements for use in the task. Subjects made allocations of initial edowments between hypothetical firms, disclosed confidence in their allocation decisions and reported on specific characteristics of the financial statements. Differences in reported usefulness of statement sets furnished were found to be associated strongly with measured information content. The results also provide limited evidence that decisions and judgments of subjects were affected by the information content of the accounting aggregations provided.